Intan

Not back on social media yet just tired of getting shown tweets and not being able to read the replies

@rwlesq @pangramlabs @benglickenhaus Bruh this is literally twitter why would you use AI to refine your words 😭💀

I wrote the post and then used ChatGPT to copy edit. Here's the original if your interested. A major problem with the "Bullshit Jobs" thesis is thinking that "adversarial" means "unnecessary." It's true that adversarial usually means zero-sum at the micro level, but that doesn't mean it is zero-sum on the macro level. A breach of contract lawsuit is negative sum on the micro level. At the end of the day, it may or may not transfer some money from the defendant to the plaintiff, while a whole bunch of people spend a whole bunch of time fighting over whether this should happen. However, such lawsuits are basically necessary to have a rule of law, which is a massively positive sum. Communism was basically an effort to eliminate adversarial jobs. There is no need to have workers or companies or anyone else competing against each other - we'll just have the government decide how things should work. It was a colossal failure, both because you lose all the information gained through the adversarial process and because it creates massive room for corruption by whoever was tasked with making the decisions. David Graeber basically suffered from not understanding Chesterton's Fence. He looked at jobs, couldn't understand what purpose they served (usually because he didn't think about it for more than a minute), and assumed that they must be bullshit. In fact, most of the jobs he complained about served as the necessary scaffolding for some greater purpose. Here's ChatGPTs proposed revision, some of which I took, some of which I revised further A major flaw in the “bullshit jobs” thesis is confusing “adversarial” with “unnecessary.” Many adversarial roles are wasteful at the level of any single dispute, but necessary at the level of the system. Litigation, compliance, auditing, and other apparently zero-sum activities often provide the enforcement, information, and deterrence that make rule-of-law and market institutions possible. A breach-of-contract suit is usually negative-sum for the parties in that one case. But a world in which contracts cannot be credibly enforced is far worse. The same is true of many forms of institutional friction: they look like deadweight if you isolate the transaction, but they are part of the scaffolding that lets the larger system function. Graeber’s mistake was often Chesterton’s Fence: seeing a role whose purpose was not immediately obvious to him and inferring that it therefore had no purpose. Some jobs really are padded or performative. But many others exist because adversarial systems generate information, constrain discretion, and reduce corruption in ways that are easy to miss if you only look at the immediate transaction.

A major flaw in the “Bullshit Jobs” thesis is confusing “adversarial” with “unnecessary.” Many adversarial roles appear zero- or even negative-sum at the micro level, but are positive-sum at the macro level. Litigation, compliance, auditing, and other apparently zero-sum activities often provide the enforcement, information, and deterrence that make rule-of-law and market institutions possible. A breach-of-contract suit is usually negative-sum for the parties in that one case. But a world in which contracts cannot be credibly enforced is far worse. The same is true of many forms of institutional friction: they look like deadweight if you isolate the transaction, but they are part of the scaffolding that lets the larger system function. Adversarial systems generate information, constrain discretion, and reduce corruption in ways that are easy to miss if you look only at the immediate transaction. Central planning rested in part on the assumption that many such adversarial processes were wasteful and could be replaced by administrative decision-making. That proved disastrous: you lose the information generated by decentralized contestation and create enormous room for corruption by the people making the decisions. Graeber’s mistake was often Chesterton’s Fence: seeing a role whose purpose was not immediately obvious to him and inferring that it therefore had no purpose. Maybe some jobs really are padded or performative, but many others exist because they form the scaffolding that keeps the systems running.

“Love is understanding not transformation” Guillermo Del Toro all I hear is transformation could not precede understanding